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During the 1930s, it seemed as though dive bombing had the potential to be a decisive factor in aerial warfare, offering far greater accuracy than could be achieved with the primitive bombsights used by conventional bombers. US Navy and Marine Corps bomber squadrons had demonstrated the effectiveness of the technique in counter-insurgency operations in Haiti and Nicaragua in the 1920s. These successes prompted aircraft companies around the world to design their own dive bombers, including Savoia-Marchetti in Italy, which produced the SM.85.
The company was handicapped by the dire shortage of powerful aircraft engines, an issue that plagued the entire Italian aviation industry. This ruled out a single-engine design and forced the use of two 450hp Piaggio P.VII C.35 engines. The first prototype was flown in December 1936, and test-pilots fiercely criticised its poor speed and rate of climb. But Savoia-Marchetti were confi
dent that these problems could be corrected in the production stage. Trials in April 1937 at the Furbara test centre, north of Rome, were attended by Mussolini himself and led to orders for 32 aircraft, 19 of which formed the first Italian dive-bomber unit, 96° Gruppo Bombardmento a Tuffo (BaT), with two Squadriglia, 236 and 237, in March 1940.
Flying Banana
The aircraft was a single-seat twin-engine monoplane with a cantilever wing and retractable landing gear. It featured a very simple box-type fuselage with a marked upward sweep to nose and tail, earning the SM.85 the nickname of the ‘Flying Banana’. The design was intended to give the pilot the best possible forward view, with a transparent panel built into the cockpit floor to aid target acquisition. A single 800kg bomb could be carried for short-range missions, but this dramatically worsened the aircraft’s already poor performance, so a 500kg bombload was found to be more practical.
Despite the manufacturer’s claims, the aircraft remained riddled with faults, including frequent uncontrollable spins and instability during the dive. This ruined bombing accuracy and was largely due to the design’s reliance on flaps to act as ineffective dive brakes. The type was already under-powered, and the engines rarely reached their theoretical maximum power, contributing to an extremely slow rate of climb when pulling up after making a dive-bombing attack. Such poor performance made the SM.85 highly vulnerable to AA fire. A final failing was that it only carried a single fixed forward-firing 12.7mm machine-gun, leaving it effectively defenceless against even obsolescent Allied fighters.
In June 1940, several units of the aircraft were deployed to the island of Pantelleria off Sicily in preparation for attacks against Malta and the British Mediterranean fleet. The unit commander, Maggiore Ercolano Ercolani, angrily told his superiors that their performance was so abysmal that 100% losses could be expected in action. The deployment began badly when one SM.85 crashed on landing at Pantelleria, severely injuring the pilot, and another two were damaged. Fortunately for their crews, the remaining aircraft only made two operational sorties, without making contact with Allied forces, before the type was withdrawn from service in July 1940 and replaced by a hundred or so Ju 87 Stukas purchased from Germany.
Strengths: simple, cheap design
Weaknesses: poor engine performance, limited armament
Images: Wikimedia Commons
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